I’ll be honest, about a year ago I was appointed as the ITIL Problem Management process owner and I didn’t really get it… My only real exposure to ITIL was with my current employer, before that I had done bits but it wasn’t really what you’d call ITIL.

Anyway, following a year of feeling my way around the process, I attended the Problem Management Practitioner course with Purple Griffon Training as they’re ITIL specialists. I love attending external training if for no other reason than to chat to people from different organisations and find out how they do it and their successes and failures, we’re all trying to achieve the same thing at the end of the day right?

What I’ve come to realise is there are some pretty strong arguments to ensure that Problem Management is well delivered and strongly embedded in every IT department. We all do Problem Management but as ever, ITIL gives you the framework to succeed and measure it’s success. I should be heading back with a real passion to improve what we do, but as part of this I’m going to need more people and therefore more money. This is, however, an investment into a more stable infrastructure resulting in more productive staff.

Oh, an we also need to change the tool that we’re using for Incident, Change, Problem, Release and Service Level. Phew, glad there’s not much work to do.

Well, it’s been an interesting week for email. I work for quite a large organisation (4,000+ users) and one of our remote workers decided to share his frustration with a recent board decision by emailing everyone in the company. As a rule we limit the people that can send to the distribution list containing all staff in the organisation, however, we removed the limit for the number of recipients for a project we ran recently, therefore, when our remote worker found that they were unable to send to this list, they simply expanded the list and sent to the individuals instead… *sigh*

The result? A very busy Exchange organisation! In the day it was sent, there were a plethora of “Out of Office” replies, not to mention the staff that felt it would be appropriate to “Reply to All”. In fact there were in excess of one million emails generated that day, and given the amount of text contained within this message (the 4,000+ contacts) the message size was in excess of 4MB.

Now we do have some monitoring tools in place which allow us to monitor and report on the messaging environment, this revealed some interesting numbers. For example, out average message size increased by 2865% which had an excellent knock on effect for our enterprise vault.

We have resolved this in the short term by hiding this address list to ensure that staff are unable to expand the list of names, however, this doesn’t stop people from replying to the existing message. So how do we resolve this permanently? Answers on a post card. One suggestion is to use exmerge to remove the message from every mailbox.

I’ve been needing to vent about HP Openview for some time now, and this appears to be as good a vessel as any. We spent quite a bit of money on purchasing HP Openview, specifically Network Node Manager (NNM) Openview Operations Manager (OVO) and Openview Performance Insight (OVPI).

To date I have been less than impressed with the suite of products for a variety of reasons. The first being the lack of integration between these products, my impression of OVPI for example is that it will produce the management reports I need to pass to the IT Director to assure him that the money he has invested in this vast infrastructure is well founded. Does the product provide this, well, not really. The reports are far too granular, I can report on one particular server, but trying to provide an overview of the whole infrastructure appears almost impossible, unless of course you want to pay HP Professional Services £1,500 a day to come in and develop new reporting templates? I don’t, we are going to see what we can do in house.

The second issue with HP Openview is the closed environment that appears to exist (or not as the case may be!), search the web for some information and you’ll see just how bad it is. Excluding the HP forums, which aren’t great, there is little information out there.

Finally (for now) HP Openview appears to be somewhat of a dark art! You could really spend your life playing with it and still only know a fraction of it’s functionality. I have yet to send anyone on the training courses so I will see what they come back with but for now, I remain unimpressed!